Five Recommended Arts Events This Weekend

Are you having fun yet, citizen?

Although … maybe you’d prefer to just mope around, ever-so-subtly demonstrating how bored and miserable you are? Because it’s a cheap way of getting someone to pay attention to you? Yeah, fuck that. We’re all gonna die, eventually; might as well enjoy life while you can.

And, look – here’s some things to help with that, some things to go out and be delighted by:

1) How about a few shoggoths in your surf-shorts, daddy-o? How about a little eldritch commedia dell'arte action at the Butterfly Bar this Friday and Saturday night? Because – ia! – here comes La Fenice, Austin’s favorite classically inflected madcaps, going all non-Euclidean with their Cthulhu Beach Party and bringing the late-night Lovecraft zaniness to a new sort of cultural mashup that ph'nglui mglw'nafh Ph’ranki’avalon R’lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn …

3) Head east and get you a visual load of new works being exhibited at three separate galleries on the sunrise side of the city. There’s “Innocence in Silence” from Jieun Beth at Big Medium; “Salty Feel” from this year's Eyes Got It! winner Ingrid Tremblay at grayDUCK Gallery; and Nat Bradford and Tsz Kam’s “Door by the Garden” at the soon-to-be-shuttered Pump Project. Receptions for each one this Friday night, to stimulate your rods-and-cones and wet your wine-loving whistles.

4) Laird Barron’s in town on Friday night, too, and the acclaimed horror writer’s unveiling his debut crime-fiction novel, Blood Standard, at BookPeople at 7pm. Note: Rumors that he’ll be wearing a Hathaway shirt are unsubstantiated at press time; but word-on-the-street that the man writes like a grisly master of prose and spins tales that will unnerve you for weeks, that is well corroborated.

5) Maybe you’re all about, we don’t know, Taylor Swift and whatever else passes for pop fulfillment these days? Or it could be that some of the more experimental and downright scientific treatments of music – predicated on soundwaves qua soundwaves, on altered radio transmissions, and so on – is more your thing? Not that it’s all so binary as that, no. But if those latter explorations are what appeal, then we reckon you’ll be in radioheaded heaven at the Steve Parker-curated Soundspace: Transmissions multi-artist concert at the Blanton Museum of Art this Sunday afternoon.

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